1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present invention relate to a liquid ejecting apparatus, such as an inkjet type printer, that is provided with a liquid ejecting head that ejects liquid in a pressure chamber from a nozzle by providing pressure fluctuations to the pressure chamber that communicates with the nozzle, and to a method of controlling such a liquid ejecting apparatus.
2. Related Art
A liquid ejecting apparatus is an apparatus that is provided with a liquid ejecting head that is capable of ejecting (discharging) liquid and ejects various liquids from the liquid ejecting head. A representative example of the liquid ejecting apparatus is an image recording apparatus, such as an ink jet type printer (hereinafter simply referred to as a printer) that is provided with an ink jet type recording head (hereinafter simply referred to as a recording head) as a liquid ejecting head and performs recording of an image or the like by ejecting and landing ink in the form of a liquid droplet from nozzles of the recording head onto a recording medium (ejection target) such as recording paper. Also, in recent years, the liquid ejecting apparatus has been applied to various manufacturing apparatuses without being limited to the image recording apparatus. For example, in an apparatus for manufacturing a display such as a liquid crystal display, a plasma display, an organic EL (Electro Luminescence) display, or an FED (surface-emitting display), a liquid ejecting apparatus is used to eject various liquid materials, such as a color material or an electrode onto a pixel formation region, an electrode formation region, or the like.
Certain printers have a recording head in which a column of nozzles that eject dye-based ink is disposed side by side in a main scanning direction with a column of nozzles for pigment-based ink. The nozzles in each column of nozzles are provided in line in a direction intersecting the main scanning direction. Moreover, the dye-based ink includes dye in a color material and the pigment-based ink includes pigment in a color material.
In a printer configured in this manner, if an image or the like is recorded or printed on a recording medium, in particular, recording paper while making the recording head perform reciprocating scanning with respect to the recording paper, the landing sequence of the dye-based ink and the pigment-based ink in the recording paper differs in a forward path and a return path in a scanning direction. For this reason, if the dye ink and the pigment ink land in an overlapping manner in the recording paper, there is a fear that a recorded image will be blurred due to a difference in the paper infiltration amount between the inks or interference between the inks. In particular, in a case where different colors are mixed into each other due to oozing, there is a fear that the image quality of a recorded image will be deteriorated.
In order to cope with such a problem, a printer has been proposed that causes dye-based ink to land on the recording medium prior to pigment-based ink, regardless of the scanning direction. A printer of this type has a set of columns of nozzles, in which a column of nozzles for the pigment-based ink is disposed on the downstream side in a scanning direction of a column of nozzles for the dye-based ink, at each of both sides with the center in the scanning direction of the recording head interposed therebetween. Accordingly, the printer can reduce density unevenness (or color unevenness) due to a difference in infiltration rate when inks that include different color materials land on the recording medium (refer to JP-A-2007-261205, for example).
However, in the printer having the set of columns of nozzles at each of both sides with the center in the scanning direction of the recording head interposed therebetween, as described above, there are disadvantages. For example, an increase in size of the printer is caused by not only an increase in the number of columns of nozzles, but also by a corresponding increase in the number of pressure chambers communicating with the respective nozzles, pressure generation sections varying the volumes of the pressure chambers, or the like. Moreover, the configuration of such a printer is complicated.